Despite early attempts to merge into one national carrier, CP Air continued to operate routes based on its previous bush flying heritage.

[citation needed] The development of the great circle or polar route to the Far East from CP Air's Vancouver base would become one of the cornerstones of the airline.

The big Britannia propjet was also used to fly non-stop service from Windsor, Ontario to Mexico City with this flight originating in Toronto before being replaced by a DC-8.

[7] Also during the mid-1970s, CP Air was operating stretched Douglas DC-8-63 jetliners (which the airline called the Super DC-8 "Spacemaster") on the Vancouver-Honolulu-Nandi-Sydney route twice a week.

Amsterdam was their principal European destination for these services, with direct flights to both Eastern and Western Canada, and connections were emphasized onwards to other countries.

They also developed extensive charter flights (operated mainly in summertime) beginning in the mid-1960s and through the 1970s and 1980s to Britain, France, Germany and other European points which permitted them some access to these markets.

In 1979, the federal government eliminated the fixed market share of transcontinental flights for Air Canada (the successor to TCA).

While this was a condition that was pressed by CP Air for a long time, it now scrambled to upgrade its fleet to expand on newly available routes such as new nonstop service from Vancouver to Hong Kong and Shanghai to go along with adding more flights to its then current routes like Amsterdam, Rome, Tokyo and Sydney to prepare for increased competition from Air Canada in its traditional territory.